


ravviso il sogno

by R_Knight



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Dreams, Isolation, Kings & Their Knights, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Past Lives, Pining, Recovered Memories, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Space Opera, Visions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-11 18:14:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17451929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R_Knight/pseuds/R_Knight
Summary: Alex doesn’t dream. But Nicke – Nicke does. He dreams of floral winds and of heavy furs, he dreams of blue-green waterfalls and the smell of metal on their hands. He dreams of stars, and of the weight of rings on his fingers, a crown upon his head. But more than anything, he dreams of Sasha.





	1. Prologue: Alex

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time I wrote a dissertation about space travel and religious transcendence, and ended up with eight thousand words of notes I hadn’t used. This fic is me not getting over it and instead projecting onto two hockey players. Enjoy!
> 
> The title is from the first few lines of La Boheme, Act 1- ‘Di mite circonfuso alba lunar / In te ravviso il sogno / Ch’io vorrel sempre sognar’, which translates to something like _Bathed in the soft glow of moonlight / In you I see a dream / A dream I'll always dream._

_“…I pray remember me Upon the moors, beneath the stars With the King’s wild company’  
_-Susanna Clarke

 

Alex didn’t dream.

As a child he’d argued with his brothers when they’d insisted he _had_ to dream sometimes, _everyone_ did. Even his mother had patted him on the head and said something like _you just don’t remember them Sasha._ But he had waited and waited, grown taller and stronger, lived through loss and been drafted to the NHL, and still he hadn’t dreamed. The welcoming void of sleep stayed with him all the way until 2006, until he was stood in front of a boy, barely a man, with curls so light they could only really be described as angelic or bleached, and said some words into a microphone he could barely remember the second they left his mouth.

Later, alone in the privacy of his hotel room, Alex dreamt for the first time.

He dreamed that he was a carefully wrapped cocoon, layers flaking away in the morning sun; he was a child tugging at his mother’s skirts, ragged and torn in a way they never had been in this life. He was on a beach, in a lake, at the bottom of a gorge – a great, heaving thing with water so clear it glowed, and wind that plucked flowers from the blossom trees like a curious child, flurries of it raining down on him, caught in his hair and the furs that draped his shoulders. But even with the beauty that surrounded him, the dusty pink petals and the hazy summer warmth that settled as night fell, the sparkling waters and the echoing cricket-song through the valley, Sasha only had eyes for one thing: the man, the boy, the king at his feet.

Nicke’s cheeks were burnt red from a day in the sun, and the same petals caught in Sasha’s hair had settled like a halo in his own, not yet brushed and looking all the worse for it. Sasha thought that he would have to spend an hour untangling it all, and Nicke would complain the entire time. Sasha thought a great many number of things; that they should make a fire soon, or they would have to set up camp by moonlight, that he was fortunate to have caught that boar earlier, for he was famished. That it must be blasphemy or treason to see your king on his knees and not drop to your own, to offer your hand or your shoulder for him to stand and right your positions, forgive you your indiscretion or otherwise punish you as was his right.

But this was Nicke, with his fingertips dipped in starlight, and he was Sasha, with his scars and his crooked nose and his fondness for animals, and they had known each other so very long. So instead he thread a hand through the tangles of Nicke’s hair, traced thick fingers down the warmth of his pink cheeks and across the sharp slope of his nose. He pressed his thumb to the bow of Nicke’s lips, and when Nicke’s eyes slid shut, and he opened his mouth as if in communion, Sasha allowed himself a moment of weakness, and he took what was offered.

                                                                                                                                    

Alex woke tangled up in his sheets, wet with sweat and tears and come, panting and scared. It took him some seconds before he remembered where he was, who he was – but as the details of the dream faded, grains of sand escaping through a cracked hourglass, Alex was left with only his rapidly cooling skin and his shaky heartbeat. He began to feel a little foolish. He wasn’t sure what the dream had been about – only had the vaguest sense that there had been a blossom tree, and that he had been on his knees maybe. He thought he might hear the echoes of running water.

Alex stared at the milky-grey light beginning to spill through the curtains, distracted by the prickling feeling still under his skin, on his lips, the webbing between his fingers; wondering what his body was remembering that he could not. But the more he struggled to remember his dream the more it faded away, and soon, it was if he had never dreamt at all.


	2. Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning.
> 
> _"They might have been there. His subconscious might have taken his friends and teammates and molded them into different versions of themselves, he might have created a whole other world, other life, and stitched it together with the needle clenched between his teeth, swallowing the threads whole._
> 
> _They might have been there. But so far the memories – the dreams – were filled with Sasha and Sasha alone."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is set somewhat loosely during the 17-18 season. Loosely in as much as I have done research, but I may have missed some things, and also the nature of this story necessitates some laxness.

_“Someone will remember us_  
I say  
even in another time.”  
-Sappho

 

There wasn’t anything special about the first time Nicke dreamed of Sasha. He wasn’t concussed, it wasn’t after a good win or a particularly bad one, was neither after his first NHL point nor his hundredth. It wasn’t at the draft either, but Nicke thought that that was perhaps because he was having other, less appropriate dreams about _Alex_ that night. No, the first time Nicke dreamed of Sasha was a decade in the making, and after nothing at all. He only remembered any of it much later, during practice.

Nicke was standing on his own a little away from the rest of the team, feeling sweaty and tired in a way that an optional skate really shouldn’t have made him, when Alex appeared at his shoulder.

“Tired, old man?” Alex asked, smiling lazily. Nicke had a comment ready on the tip of his tongue about weak chirps, but then Alex did something he’d done a dozen, a thousand times before: he took a knee, and whatever Nicke had been about to say was swept away in overwhelming wave of memory that hit him. _Not a memory_ , Nicke corrected himself, trying to sort through the wash of images, of an eager audience waiting for him to cast judgement, of his sword on Alex’s shoulder as he knelt before him on a plush rug, of the way the name _Sasha_ had felt in his mouth, mealy and well-worn.

Before he could think better of it, or before he could really think at all, Nicke told Alex, “I had a dream about you last night.” Alex’s smile grew infinitely more impish at that, and Nicke had to briefly question his own sanity.

“Did I treat you good?” Alex asked, his head tilted back and to the side, looking for all the world like a curious dog. It was a shame Nicke knew him too well to be fooled by a friendly demeanour. Give a wolf an inch and it’d take far more than a mile.

“I was a king,” Nicke said, deflecting, “you were a knight.” There really hadn’t been much more to it than that, now that he was remembering, and he wasn’t sure why he ever brought it up. Alex hummed and stayed down on one knee.

“Makes sense. You very regal.” Nicke raised his eyebrows incredulously, but Alex continued, “No, I’m right. And I think I protect you pretty good now, so.” He shrugged diplomatically, like he was making a reasonable argument for his made-up knighthood.

“I didn’t knight you because you can hit people for me,” Nicke said.

“No? What for then?”

Thankfully Nicke was saved from having to answer him when Trotz called them over to talk about a line shakeup, and Alex was on his feet and gone before Nicke had to come up with something. It was probably a good thing, Nicke figured, because if the myriad of marks on dream Alex – on _Sasha’s_ neck hadn’t been an answer enough for why he’d been chosen, the liquid-molten look he’d directed at Nicke sure as hell would have been. And that wasn’t something Alex needed to know about.

*

Nicke was altogether too old to be having sex dreams about his friends, least of all ones that involved a _plotline_ , so when he woke up from the third dream about Sasha in as many nights, only this time with an unmistakable tightness in his gut and the slow realization that he’d been grinding against his sheets, he did the adult thing, and he ignored it. He wasn’t above falling back on imagining-coach-naked methods if it was necessary, and the memory of the way Alex – _Sasha_ had flushed a pleasant pink under Nicke’s touch ensured that it most certainly was.

He lasted almost six entire minutes before he made the executive decision that 3am on a Monday morning wasn’t the time to be practising good decision-making, and rolled onto his side so that he could get easier access to his dick, fortunately not yet in a place where grinding against his mattress was in any way appealing while awake. He didn’t try to avoid thinking about it, not sure he could forget it if he wanted to, so rather than torture himself he sunk back into the dream, and he let himself remember.

It had started like the previous ones had, with the man who was Alex in so many ways, yet not. Nicke couldn’t say why he thought so, since he’d barely even spoke in most of the dreams, but still. The man that dream-Nicke called Sasha had been on his knees, not as he would before his king, with one foot still on the floor, but relaxed, with his weight resting on the backs of his calves. Dream-Nicke wasn’t only a younger version of himself, but a more solemn one maybe. Or, perhaps that wasn’t quite right; the Nicke in his dream had a weight on his shoulders that he himself would never experience, and that had shaped him in ways that Nicke couldn’t know. Mostly because, he reminded himself, _that_ Nicke didn’t exist.

Still. Dream-Nicke had tried to be serious, tried desperately, foolishly, to convince himself that he didn’t need this. And when that didn’t work, he tried to tell himself that this was the last time, that he could live with this moment and the memories of their past, and that would be enough. It had never worked for him before, but he had faith that one day it might. In the meantime, though, Nicke would take what was offered.

He would take Sasha’s unconditional loyalty and wrap it around himself like a cloak, he would take Sasha’s huge body, take the effusive praise that Sasha lay daily at his feet, he would take Sasha, take him unto himself, and being an innately selfish creature, he would never let go. He imagined his hands at sixty, at eighty, gnarled and papery, clawed nails digging decades-deep gouges into Sasha’s arms, and shuddered. No matter that Sasha was a willing captive, Nicke would forever carry guilt for what he’d made Sasha do for him. Sasha, so effusive, so full of emotion that it spilled over his edges and soaked into everyone around him, was never meant to hide the way he felt about _anything_ , least of all the person he loved.

Yet he told Nicke that he would take what he was given, happy with sneaking around and swallowing his pretty words, his sweet smiles, if it meant that they could still have this – stolen moments at dusk, or when the sun came yawning over the valley, the only time they wouldn’t be missed. It was a condition that Nicke should never have inflicted on him, but in his youth Nicke had sought refuge in small acts of rebellion, and knighting Sasha as his first act of king had felt like something that would also keep them close at the time. It had made being together only that much harder, in the end, but still - they survived yet, on stolen kisses and hasty moments secreted away at the bottom of the gorge.

Sasha’s fingers pressed against his wrists, pulling Nicke away from his thoughts, urging him down for a kiss, and Nicke, selfish and isolated and worried for their future, took what was offered.

*

Nicke burst violently into wakefulness, pushing himself upright so that he could take long desperate gulps of air to calm his body, to clear his lungs of the lingering smell of that other place – that other world with its sweet floral winds, and of Sasha, with his old furs and the heavy musk of him, a little coppery from handling metal day and night. It took a few long minutes before Nicke could remember where he was, _who_ he was: a hockey player, a Swede, a Capital, a man too old for the sort of gut-numbing love that lingered still at his peripheries – like if he could just turn his head fast enough he could catch some meaning, some physical evidence of it before it faded away. He didn’t try. The dream was already too vivid, to real for him to be wallowing in the feelings of this other self. Letting himself pretend – no. Nothing good could become of that.

He’d fallen back into sleep with his hand still in his briefs, so he gingerly removed it, not at all surprised to find evidence of an orgasm he couldn’t remember achieving dried and tacky over his fingers. Nicke checked his phone, which told him that he had forty minutes until his alarm would go off. He wouldn’t be able to sleep now, so he forced himself up and into the shower, stumbling through the rest of his routine and making himself eat breakfast that he didn’t want.

By the time he was dressed and ready to leave for practice, he was feeling far more functional, and a little less like he was a single misstep away from being dragged back under by the dream, still painfully vivid even now. Nicke wasn’t sure what had bought them on, and why they were recurring with such regularity and intensity in a way he’d never experienced before, especially since it was pre-season, and Nicke had maybe the lowest stress levels he would all year – without the excuse of stress, he was stumped for why they had started, why they continued.

But for now he had practice, he had hockey. It would have to wait.

*

Alex circled Nicke with a kind of predatory gleefulness during practice that morning, which was not something Nicke was equipped to handle, not with only a couple of hours of sleep and the lingering scent of something otherworldly clouding his head, let alone when Alex finally drifted to a stop – using Nicke’s chest, his belly as a way to do so. Nicke very consciously focused on the smell of the ice to avoid doing what he wanted to do and start comparing Alex’s scent to Sasha’s, to see if the metal smell might still linger, if his sweat could have the same tang, the same wild musk from that other place.

That way lay only madness, though; whatever he found would be disappointing, or relieving, or meaningless, and he would be dissatisfied no matter what, because he didn’t know what he wanted the answer to be in the first place.

The weight of Alex’s body had set them on a gentle backward slide across the ice. Nicke didn’t try to stop it. “So?” Alex asked him, sounding for all the world a mischievous child. “You have any more nice dreams, Backy? I fight a dragon for you?”

“No dragons,” Nicke told him.

“You have a dream, though,” Alex replied, delighted. Woops.

“Not just about you,” Nicke protested, “The others were there too.” Which might have been true, and Nicke felt like it could have been, but his dreams so far had mostly taken place at the bottom of the gorge, with he and Sasha sequestered away from the rest of the world – or otherwise in flashes of that great hall, when Sasha had taken a knee and Nicke hefted the ceremonial sword over his shoulders, eyes for him and no one else. So they might have been there. His subconscious might have taken his friends and teammates and molded them into different versions of themselves, he might have created a whole other world, other life, and stitched it together with the needle clenched between his teeth, swallowing the threads whole.

They might have been there. But so far the memories – the dreams – were filled with Sasha and Sasha alone. Nicke didn’t think he wanted to know what that meant.

*

Alex dropped the subject when Nicke wouldn’t give him any more information, and Nicke managed to survive their conversation without getting distracted searching for differences between him and Sasha. He refocused, he put his head down, and he set his dreams aside as something to deal with later.

Later came sooner than he expected though, and that night when he was on the very edge of sleep he began to feel the smoky edges of the dream coming back to him, the sweet air and the late summer heat - and then he was jolting himself awake. Pushing the thoughts away during the day was useless: it only meant that they came back twice as hard at night, which caused more dreams, and more thoughts, and Nicke was stuck in a vicious cycle. A cycle devoted almost entirely to Alexander Ovechkin’s alternate self, a little heavier, a little harder, a lot more scarred, and in possession of his own Nicklas, who was desperately, disgracefully in love with him.  
  
Nicke would be embarrassed by how utterly transparent he was if Sasha weren’t just as clumsily apparent in his own feelings.

He was more embarrassed at himself, his _real_ self, the hockey player with no royal obligations and no passionate love story straight from a romance novel, for coming up with them in the first place – intentionally or not, Nicke wasn’t naturally inclined towards romance or fantasy, and he didn’t like the way the dreams had begun to stir something in him. He had to cut them off at the head, cauterise the wound before they could get worse.

That was easier said than done, though. Simply _not_ thinking of them hadn’t worked, thinking intently of other things hadn’t either, and by the time he’d tried herbal teas, a shot of whiskey, meditation, and just working out until he was theoretically too tired to dream, he was desperate. He woke up every morning with the taste of Sasha on his tongue, and making eye contact with Alex was getting more difficult the longer and more detailed the dreams had started to become.

Nicke was on the verge of talking to a doctor about the potential of sleeping tablets when the dreams changed. He fell asleep like normal; the humid summer warmth trickling into his bedroom first, followed by the floral winds, and then – he was in the gorge. Except this time it was different.

*

“How did you find this place?” Sasha asked him, his eyes wide as saucers, head tilted back so that he could take in everything as he spun in a slow circle, savoring the view. Nicke thought that the threat of his father’s wrath was worth this: worth seeing the loveliness of Sasha’s smile, the way his cheeks filled out and his eyes crinkled into tiny semi-circles and his whole body – whip-thin and half way through what felt like his third growth spurt to Nicke’s null – would shiver like it could barely contain the breadth of his excitement, his overfull emotions.

“Mama’s sister told me. She also told me not to tell anyone, but you don’t count, so.”

“I count!” Sasha protested, finally turning back to face Nicke. His hair was plastered to his head with the wet heat in the air, cheeks flushed and sweat clinging to his clothes. Nicke wasn’t much better off – neither of them were used to the endless humidity here yet, no matter that it had been almost a month since Nicke was pulled away from his studies and told that his older brother had run away with a girl and thus Nicke could no longer play at a normal life. Because he was next in line to the throne. As the rightful heir, Kristoffer had been training since he was born, practically, and Nicke had thirteen years of catching up to do, so he had to leave the snowy wilderness of Sasha’s home, where he had been schooling, and also where he had met Sasha for the first time, and come back to Barak for the foreseeable future.

He wasn’t proud of what could only be called a tantrum that he threw in response to the news, the first time he’d cried in as long as he could remember, but he couldn’t be upset about the outcome. Sasha, with his parents blessing, had followed Nicke all the way back to the palace. His parents had made sounds about wards and good politics and being visibly charitable, but Nicke didn’t care so long as they got to stay together. He felt like he couldn’t imagine a time before Sasha any more.

“You _don’t_ count,” Nicke told Sasha imperiously, “Or I would have to assassinate you in case you told anyone.”

Sasha gasped, pretending at shock. “You can’t do that!”

“Well, I’m going to be king, so I think that I could.”

“No, because _I’m_ going to be your assassin, and you can’t kill me, or there’d be no one to kill the people you actually want to assassinate,” Sasha told him, folding his arms and raising an eyebrow. Nicke thought Sasha might have learnt that from himself, and he sincerely regretted it. Arguments weren’t resolved with eyebrows.

“You’re going to be my assassin?” Nicke asked him, ignoring the last part. Sasha dropped his façade of confidence then, lowering his arms and his eyebrow simultaneously.

“Well I have to earn my keep somehow,” Sasha said honestly, “I have to prove that – that I’m good enough to stay.” Good enough to stay. _Good enough._

Nicke didn’t learn that day how far, how much Sasha would do to stay in Barak with him. He didn’t learn until the first press of a sword to Sasha’s shoulder, until the next one was bloody, gone straight through. He didn’t really learn how much Sasha would do until Sasha came to him, years and years after, and said _I won’t I won’t not any more we need to leave we need to go let’s go let’s find the stars together I know you want to._

Until then, though, Nicke had Sasha: an assassin, a boy, a knight in the making. He said, _okay_ , and he pushed Sasha into the grass, sweaty, wet with dew, and they wrestled and gave each other big bruises and bigger smiles until his mother’s sister came for them and tugged at their green-stained shirts and their dirty faces and didn’t hide her smile like her sister did.

“You’re too old for that,” she told them, like learning the edges and the lines of each other’s bodies was something they would ever grow out of. For now, it was simple.

Later, it wouldn’t be.

*

Nicke woke up slowly. He spent an aching minute sure that he would turn over and find Sasha in his bed, would breathe in the sweet bright smell blowing in through the open windows and gently shake him awake to tell him about the dream he’d had of the first time they’d visited the gorge together. Sasha would laugh, would tell Nicke that he was sort of right in the end, about being an assassin, and it was a shame that he had to sneak away early this morning, but duty called for the both of them – and the nation would wait for no man, knight or God-chosen king though they may be.

But when Nicke turned over in his bed and reached out for Sasha, his hand found only cold sheets, and – _oh._ He remembered then, in a confusing rush of emotion, that there was no Sasha in this world. Or none that would sleep in Nicke’s bed, none that would draw his sword for Nicke or take one to the shoulder in return. Alex wasn’t Sasha, for all they looked the same, had the same sweet nature and same booming laugh. Alex wouldn’t joke with Nicke over shared memories of childhood, because for Alex, they weren’t real.

For Nicke, they weren’t real either. But it was getting harder and harder to remind himself of the fact. They didn’t feel like dreams, hadn’t in a while. It felt like he was _remembering_.

Whatever it was, whether he was going crazy or having delayed concussion symptoms or something else entirely, he couldn’t let it affect his hockey – or his relationship with Alex. The feelings infused within the dreams felt too big to comprehend, the love and the responsibilities and the fear and hope for the future felt huge in comparison to what was beginning to feel like a much smaller life as a hockey player.

He sat up in his bed, shaking off the residues of sleep. If he was at the point of weighing up the veritable importance of a hockey player’s life versus a non-existent king’s, then it was time to find himself a distraction. Nothing about those thoughts were useful. Fortunately, he had some Caps media business to attend to for the pre-season, something about a charity event and another school visit, which would have to work as distractions for now.

Nicke fiddled with the sheets pooled around his waist for a few more minutes, trying to forget the feeling of wet grass at his back, staring out into the grey-black of his room until he felt calm enough to start his day. Then he took a breath, and he set it all aside.

*

For the rest of the week Nicke put all his effort into keeping his interactions with the team and with Alex as normal as possible, clinging to the familiarity of hockey as much as he could before night came, and the dreams would take it from him. But by the end of the week he’d experienced an entire childhood’s worth of memories, coming with increasing frequency and a tangibility that scared him.

He dreamed that he was being tugged through the palace by his brother, confused and a little tearful that he’d been taken so abruptly away from his toys, and not even allowed to bring his favourite spaceship model with him. He remembered Kristoffer’s frightened expression when he’d ushered Nicke into a spare room and told him that they had to wait, and they had to be very very quiet, because mama and papa were talking to some very important people, and there was to be some very big changes soon, and they couldn’t distract them, okay?

He remembered meeting Sasha on his first day at the boarding school he’d been sent to, a skinny boy with big ears and a puppy-like eagerness, who saw that Nicke was struggling with the cold and loaned him his fur cape – then almost frozen half to death himself while stubbornly insisting that he was _fine_ , _he was used to the cold, he couldn’t possibly take back a gift that he’d given a prince_.

He remembered that summer back home, seeing for the first time how much had changed in Barak since he was a child. The religious paintings that now adorned almost every wall of the palace, the new churches that had sprung up in what seemed like every other street, the way the priests seemed to be _everywhere_. They were in his parents talks and meetings, they were tutors in his and Sasha’s private classes now that they were no longer in school, they were in the courtyards and on the streets, clustered in groups like chittering magpies, snagging at passers-by to ask them if they had thoughts about _the heavens._

He remembered how excited he had been to show Sasha his old bedroom, how they’d burst through the oak door only for Nicke to stop abruptly, barely aware of Sasha crashing into his back, staring at the room in confusion. He double checked the door, the hallway, but no, this was his room, only stripped bare, suddenly cavernous and clinical in its emptiness. Sasha had mumbled a question into his shoulder blades but Nicke couldn’t answer him – staring at the walls that had been filled with posters and photos of space, of the stars and the planets, the old spaceship models that should have taken up space on his shelves, the telescope that had once sat in front of his balcony window. All of it, gone. And no one would tell him _why._

Later, he remembered the tooth Sasha had lost by the hilt of a sword. It had been so close to being something terrible, but instead had become a story that he would tell at celebrations, over mead and meat and the raucous laughter of whatever crowd he had amassed. But Nicke remembered the shuddering fear when Sasha had gone down in front of him, during _training_ of all things, and he’d sworn to the Gods and the heavens and on the prospering of his nation that if he lost Sasha to something as mundane as a training fight, he’d find the nearest ship and venture out into space to face his creators and make them answer for their actions himself. He also remembered the ecstatic relief when he’d approached Sasha and found him only down one tooth and smiling through a mouthful of blood.

He remembered thinking with an absurd sense of certainty that Sasha would be his downfall one day: temptation in the form of a man.

He remembered a lot of things. Nicke felt like his head should be bursting with the dreams that had begun to slot in beside his own memories, but instead it felt _right_. Like he was gaining back lost time, re-remembering old memories he’d thought he had forgotten. It didn’t make it any easier though. He felt strangely isolated, living alone in the dark, whatever he did during the day just a way to pass time until he’d dream again. He would experience an entire year’s worth of memories in the space of a two-hour nap, and a lot more than that when he slept at night.

Perhaps that’s why he did it – used to the shape of _Sasha_ in his mouth more than he was _Alex_ or _Ovi_ right now – but when Alex skated up to him one morning, bumping gently against him to get his attention, Nicke pressed a gentle hand to his upper chest without thinking, high over his collar bones, too familiar for even them.

His fingertips grazed Alex’s neck when he said, “ _Not now Sasha_ ,” and preoccupied by the unexpected feel of skin on skin, he hadn’t even realized what he’d done until Alex tilted his head at him, bemused.

 _“_ Sasha?”

*

“Sasha?” Nicke asked, trying valiantly to keep his voice even, cursing its tendency to crack at the moment. “Sorry, father, I’m not sure why you ask.”

“He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?” The priest said, bushy eyebrows furrowed deeply in concern. “I only ask because, well, you know where he’s from. You lived there for a while Nicklas, so you must know that the people there don’t follow the same faith that we do. I hope that he’s not confusing you with stories from his own people.”

“Sasha has no faith at all,” Nicke told him petulantly.

“ _Nicklas_. I’m asking for your own good. I only want to help you,” he said. Nicke stared at the space between his eyebrows, now much smaller with how deeply he was frowning.

“If you wanted to help me you would let me have my stuff back,” Nicke told him, trying not to sound like he was sulking but probably failing. The priest sighed deeply.

“You know that can’t happen Nicklas. The ideas in your head – the things that those toys of yours encouraged – that isn’t something you can play around with. This is a very serious matter.”

Nicke gave up staring at his eyebrows and instead looked down at his own hands, fingernails chewed up with worry. His mother hated that habit. Nicke gnawed on the edge of his thumb for a second, feeling spiteful.

“I just think,” he said, spitting out the hangnail he’d bitten off, “That if you’d tell me _why_ I can’t have my stuff back, I’d be more willing to let you.” A blatent lie – he’d never be okay with his stuff being stolen away from him, but if it got him an explanation he didn’t think it mattered too much. He’d spend some time tending to the garden or something in penance. Sasha might like that. They could probably disappear for a good hour to the gorge without being noticed if they did.

The priest gave a great, heaving sigh – something he had done so often during their conversation that Nicke was beginning to think he might actually have breathing difficulties – and lay his palms on the table, fingers spread wide to accommodate his heavy rings, the stones bigger than his thumb nail. Nicke wondered briefly how much damage they could do to a cheekbone, then wondered why he’d even thought that in the first place.

“I’ll tell you what, Nicklas, if you promise to be more cooperative with me during our talks, then I’ll answer some questions for you.”

Nicke agreed readily to that, and to give him credit, the priest did answer most of Nicke’s questions. It was just that none of it helped. None of it was anything that Nicke wanted to hear. The priest explained how Nicke’s parents _saw the light_ or whatever, realized that their religion was the correct path and that the future of Barak lay with the church. How they saw that to explore the stars was to try to reach the heavens, and _that_ was blasphemy, and so they had cancelled the expeditions, had recalled the exploratory ships, and they had buried them deep underground.

Nicke bristled at the thought of the ships left abandoned beneath their feet, gathering dust in their brand new catacombs. _Per cultum nobis astra_ , ‘we worship the stars’ his ass. Maybe Nicke was built wrong, was a differently made thing to the rest of Barak, but he thought that to worship something was to covet it, was to take it in hand and study it and study it until every part of it was known, until the truth of its nature had been given to him so fully, so absolutely, that he could live in it, bask in it, swallow it whole.

Unbidden, thoughts of Sasha came to him then, and he tried not to grimace. His subconscious crept up on him at the worst times. Still, he needed to know more.

“ _Why_ though?”

“Because, Nicklas,” the priest said slowly, his words becoming clipped in a way that Nicke recognised from arguments with his father, a bad omen, “The heavens are for the Gods and the Gods alone. It was – hubris, Nicklas, for us to think that we could go there. To think that we could ever become more than we are. So it’s for the best. That we forget what’s out there, forget what we tried to do in the past. Forget the sin of Barak, and our ancestors, for trying to become what we are not.”

“But-”

“ _No!”_ The priest raised his voice then, slamming his hand down on the table hard enough that Nicke startled, knee cracking on the underside. “No. Forget the stories, Nicklas, forget what you thought as a child. This is how things should be. This is for the best. _This_ is for the best.” He pressed his forefinger to the table as he said it, one manicured nail digging into the wood where his rings had left little dents behind. Nicke fought not to shiver, not to show him how frightened he’d made him – by hitting the table, by his loud voice, by every terrible word he could feel pressing upon him, weighing him down. Nicke stayed very, very quiet, and for a moment, there was only the sounds of them breathing, and the low scratch of the priest’s nail on wood. And then he sighed again.

“Now that’s done, I’d like to go back to this friend of yours–”

*

“I think if you calling me Sasha then I can call you Kolya, Nicke.”

It took him a minute to register what Alex was saying. It took Nicke a minute to register what the hell was going on, because one second he’d been – and then – _fuck_. He’d never had one of his dreams while awake before. Dream, because the conscious equivalent was hallucination, or – or _vision_ , which were both so far beyond the realm of acceptable he couldn’t think about it. Alex was still looking at him closely, a little bemused, a little concerned, and Nicke couldn’t stand it.

“Sorry,” Nicke said, forcing himself to take his hand away from Alex’s chest and wishing, for one terrible second that this was a world where he didn’t have to. “Sorry O, didn’t sleep. And no you can’t call me Kolya.” He tried to make his smile light-hearted, wondering what he had looked like for the seconds or minutes that he’d been gone. Had he still been behaving as normal, only without being aware? Or had he stood rigid and staring, seeing something that wasn’t there? It had either been too short or not obvious enough to concern Alex, because he only shook his head at Nicke, pretending at sadness.

“You never let me call you anything good.”

“Because my name is fine,” Nicke said, grounding himself in the familiarity of the argument. This was something they’d done before, something that rooted him in this world. Alex was a tether to Nicke’s sense of self as much as he was a terrifying reminder of the gradual loss of it. “I taught you the Swedish way of saying it, anyway. No one else besides the other Swedes do that.”

Alex hummed a little then, turning his head this way and that like he was weighing the validity of Nicke’s statement. Nicke felt something like fondness well up in his chest, heavy and aching. He was always doing that, speaking levity into the important things but treating his jokes with a kind of dogged seriousness. Like he really _was_ trying to figure out if he’d be okay with having the proper pronunciation of Nicke’s name all to himself, like it really was something that held gravity.

“Hm, okay,” Alex said finally. His eyes were alight with something Nicke couldn’t identify, the corner of his mouth twitching. He lifted one of his hands, not that far because of how they were still pressed together, then lay it carefully, deliberately, on Nicke’s collar bone. His fingers at the crook of Nicke’s neck, a mirror image of what Nicke had done earlier. Nicke could feel the brush of Alex’s skin catch on his own, barely there but striking still – as if a single line of his fingerprint had impressed itself there, as if Nicke could look in the mirror later and see the mark, a single gossamer thread that Alex had left behind.

He didn’t breathe for a long moment. Didn’t move. He watched Alex’s face, his eyes – his eyes were considering, maybe. They were seeing, and Nicke didn’t want to be seen, be known by Alex right now, when he barely knew himself. He was teetering on the edge of doing something stupid when Alex obviously reached some sort of conclusion, or realization, because he nodded, dropping his hand back to his side and pushing off his skates, sliding slowly backward.

“Okay Nicke.”

Alex said it casually, like they hadn’t just stood there frozen for a minute while he observed Nicke’s reaction to the hand on his chest. Alex said it properly, with the pop at the end. A little proprietary. Nicke watched him skate away with his lip caught between his teeth, like he was fighting a smile.

Jesus.

*

Weird moments with Alex aside, the vision was concerning. Not just because he kept catching himself referring to it as a vision, or a memory, rather than the more likely word. Because what else could it be, other than a hallucination? He had to remind himself over and over again, after every new dream, that that was all they were, all they could be. He had to talk himself out of believing, away from the increasing likelihood that he could lose himself to that other reality. So to then have one during the day, to have those memories – already so consuming – leak into this life, was terrifying. He couldn’t remember the last time his body was so tense with anxiety. Every movement felt like a fight.

He could see a doctor, could tell them about his dreams and his memories and how one had now come to him during the day, and that he sometimes thought – that he was starting to think – that maybe they _were_ true. Maybe he had been a king, or maybe he was and this life was the lie. That even if they _weren’t_ , and even if that other Nicke didn’t exist, it didn’t matter when he still felt like he was being slowly scrubbed away, stuffed so full of parallel memories that he worried his own would soon start to escape him.

He could tell that to a doctor, and he could suffer the consequences of admitting it. Or he could keep it to himself, and he could still play hockey, could avoid the concussion tests and the concerned doctors – could preserve his friendship with Alex, freeze it in amber and leave it unchanged for as long as he could before the world, or time, or more likely Nicke himself – deigned to destroy it. He didn’t doubt that it would happen: every stray thought about Sasha, every moment spent dreaming of another life led him ever closer to an irreparable mistake. He wasn’t fool enough to think that mistakenly calling Alex Sasha would be only slip up he’d suffer, even if he did manage to keep from having another memory during the day again.

He didn’t come to any decision on what to do in the end, couldn’t find a scenario in which talking about everything would help, although he knew that not saying anything wasn’t the right choice either. But as each day passed and he did nothing, and he did nothing, and he did nothing – it became a kind of new normal. Something survivable. Like a playoff injury, only endured because there was no other choice.

And at first it was fine. Nicke had played through injuries before; had played through pain and vomit and blood on his tongue, like any other player, and this was just different breed of pain to overcome. The memories stuck around, and every morning as he woke he would have to spend ten minutes, thirty, two hours coming back to himself, re-finding his body amongst the emotional overspill. He set his alarm hours before he needed to wake so that he could sort through his memories, separate them out into Nicke the king and Nicke the hockey player, pull away from the sadness or the guilt or the heavy weight of love that wasn’t his own, remember that the hip pain was his but the bruising ache in his knees and the tops of his feet from praying on hard ground – those were not. His sudden taste for sweet things wasn’t real, and the way – the way he felt about Alex, that wasn’t either. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t let it be.

So, he learned to cope. To not let it affect his hockey. The pre-season started relatively rough, and the regular season wasn’t much better – they won their first, and then their second, but through the rest of October every game felt like a slog, the few wins bare consolations. Even still, it didn’t feel like it was his fault that they weren’t doing well, or at least – not the fault of his mind being elsewhere. The ache from last year’s playoff elimination was still lingering, even with his other distractions, and the whole team was struggling to heave the memory off their shoulders, not just Nicke.

It was awful, but he was a little thankful that the distraction prevented any scrutiny coming his way. Nicke would dream, would wake up and shake it off, taking longer and longer each time, then go to practice or to work out or to a game and carefully avoid touching Alex just in case he was a catalyst for the day-time vision. Alex didn’t notice, their play started improving in November to the point that they were winning more than they lost, and everything was okay. It was fine.

Except, somewhere along the line, the memories that at first had seemed to slot so cleanly alongside his own – they start to get mixed up. During an interview after a game, when one of the reporters asked about old concussions and new regulations Nicke found himself wanting to tell a story about a ballet, about huge marble steps and tripping over his first pair of dress shoes, a little too big for his feet. He caught himself at the last second though, when the memory froze and the crack of his head on the steps became one to the ice, the concerned faces above him in helmets and hockey pads rather than the silks and pearls and suit jackets.

He managed to give the reporter a satisfactory answer if their expression was any indication – not one of confusion or bemusement or whatever other emotion he would have seen had he told them about his first concussion; not on the ice, as an adult, but as a child at a ballet in a place with sweet warm winds. Even knowing that he had never been to a ballet didn’t stop it from being so vivid, so utterly his own that he struggled to separate it the way he had been doing with the other memories of his other self.

It still plagued him even after the reporters had cleared out and left the team to dress in peace, though. Nicke picked at the separate memories, at the places they had briefly entangled, confused at how easily it had happened. Maybe if there had been more similarities, if the other Nicke had been playing hockey, or if they had been the same age, it would have made more sense for him to have been confused. But there was nothing. No reason for it. Just the undeniable reality that he was losing himself to that other world.

Nicke slowly stripped off his hockey gear, went through the routine of showering and dressing and getting himself ready to go home in silence, taking some solace in the ambient sounds of his teammates around him, laughing and talking in various stages of dress. Nicke was half way through buttoning his shirt when Andre wormed his way onto the bench next to him, foregoing the empty stall so that he could plaster himself to Nicke’s side.

“You look grumpy.”

“Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t?” Nicke asked, switching over to Swedish. He paused with his hands over his stomach to glance at Andre, head resting on his shoulder.

“Nope,” Andre said flippantly, although his expression belied his light tone. Generally he was good at hiding it, but without reassurances he’d spend all his spare time worrying over a single stray thought he’d gotten caught on. Nicke was becoming all too familiar with being consumed by thoughts that went nowhere, and he didn’t want to add to Andre’s own version of that if he could help it. Even if the sources of their worry were wildly different.

“I’m tired,” Nicke told him, wanting to offer him some kind of truth, “I’m aching.”

Andre hummed, looking thoughtful. “So you’re grumpy because you’re old and you haven’t had a nap yet.”

The chirp was weak, but expected, since Andre was clearly in a mood that demanded physicality, and goading Nicke into shoving him off the bench and wrestling with him was an easy way to get it.

After, when Nicke had helped a pink-cheeked and satisfied Andre up off the floor and gone back to getting dressed, laughing off the jeers and comments from other teammates that attempts to teach Andre how to fight were clearly not paying off, Andre only gave him one last, lingering look – waiting for Nicke’s nod, before he dropped it. Trusting that Nicke would tell him if anything were truly wrong. The guilt that prickled under his skin for keeping everything from Andre, from Alex – from all of his teammates really – was becoming painfully familiar, by now. It didn’t make it any easier.

*

Nicke didn’t make a mistake like that again in front of the media, or to any of his teammates either, but that didn’t mean the memories weren’t getting mixed up. Because they were, more and more of this life and the other becoming irreparably entwined. The emotions that came with the other memories were getting tangled up with his own too, and even knowing that they weren’t real – or at least weren’t relevant to this life – didn’t help in ignoring them.

Talking to his parents was becoming increasingly hard. Most of the time he could keep them separate in his mind effortlessly, and he could easily name the ways they differed, the clear signs that they were not the same people. But then his mother would facetime him, and his father would be there too, and then Nicke would find himself struggling not to become meek and toneless in his responses, an unwanted relic from that other life. It was strange, to hear his mother’s voice freely and openly show emotion; for her to tell him that she loved him and that she was proud of him, and all with a smile that felt so utterly foreign he’d had to make excuses for hanging up on them the first time it happened since the dreams had started. Interacting with his father was as painful as it was reassuring - that the memories of spending hours hiding away from his anger, of creeping down a marble staircase at a glacial pace to avoid his attention, of standing tall and rigid and frightened when he asked if there was any reason that he might object to Sasha’s knighthood – that none of it was real, here. That his childhood had been a happy one, free of responsibility and fear.

On his worst days, when his memories blurred so much he struggled to stay rooted in his own world, he found himself calling his parents, staring at their increasingly concerned faces and savoring it, hoarding it away. Like the discovery of a spring in a barren desert, like sand to a man who had spent his life at sea, like a hundred other metaphors that could never truly describe the way it felt to be reminded that they existed, that they were just as he remembered – that it wasn’t all a dream. That they loved him.

He usually regretted it afterwards though, because it was getting harder to explain to them why sometimes he would call unexpectedly, desperate to hear stories from his childhood, desperate for them to tell him they were proud, desperate for their love and their warmth and their gentle smiles. It wasn’t like him, to be so needy, so uncertain, and he knew that it worried them, but they indulged him anyway, likely assuming it was something of a midlife crisis – or more likely, the crisis that came with a hockey player realizing their mortality. That they had an expiration date. His father knew that feeling as well as anyone, and so Nicke hoped that they didn’t worry about him too much, having a viable source for his strange behaviour.

He couldn’t bear the thought of them being seriously worried about him, but it never stopped him from calling them, even when he kept catching himself apologizing for speaking too freely to his father, too emotionally. Not like a king at all.  


There were other things, too. Looking up at the night sky and realizing that he had been expecting to see something else – two moons, a different map of constellations. He had made the mistake of mentioning it offhand to Braden, distracted by the absence of stars that he had studied so diligently in his childhood, obsessed with visiting them one day and taking them in hand, that he had spoken out loud, without thinking.

“I can’t see the _Primus Hortus_ ,” he said, staring up at the strange absence of light. He looked for the bright triplet of stars that made up the bottom of _Stagnum Ignis,_ usually a good way to locate the outstretched arm of the mother _Primus Hortus_ beneath it, but found nothing. Beside him, Braden made an inquiring noise.

“What was that?”

“The constellation,” he said, finally looking away from the stars above them. “The first garden? You don’t have that in Canada?” Braden frowned, his brows drawing inward.

“Sorry, Nicke, is that Swedish? You – it sounds –”

 _Different_. It sounded different, Nicke realized, because he hadn’t been speaking Swedish. He’d been speaking the language of Barak: a rougher, thicker thing. Probably closer to Russian than it was Swedish or English, and he hadn’t even noticed. He could feel it still, bubbling up against his sternum, the words threatening to spill out when he wasn’t paying attention.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose to hide, for a moment, the horrific sting of his eyes, the shivering terror on the back of his neck at yet another loss of control. “Just tired.”

Braden didn’t believe him if the frown turned his way was any indication, but he didn’t push, knowing from experience not to. Nicke didn’t relish in other people being privy to his pain, and though the irony of making a career in a sport that was so intrinsically linked with pain wasn’t lost on him, he still tried his best to avoid it. Braden offered him a nod and one last lingering look before heading up the stairs to board the plane they would be taking back to Washington.

Nicke took the gift for what it was, and spent a moment collecting himself, pushing back the fear of what was happening to him. He had thought that maybe he’d hit a plateau, that maybe the worst of it had come, and that if he could just survive as he was, in this liminal space, then things would be fine. But if he was slipping without knowing now - speaking in that strange language from another world, another time - Nicke didn’t know how much longer he could last without anyone finding out.

He didn’t know what would happen then. How his teammates would deal with their alternate captain forgetting this life in favor of another. How Alex would deal with it.

Nicke stared up at the stars above him while he climbed the steps up to the plane, craning his neck and trying in vain to find something he recognized there, _anything_. Anything that would tell him he wasn’t still lost, caught up between both worlds in a way that was becoming irreparable.

There was nothing, though. He searched his memory for how the stars should look here, but found _nothing_. He couldn’t even recognize this moon any more, it's gentle white glow so different from the mottled-red twin moons that he would watch through his telescope as a child in Barak. It was like those other memories were writing over the ones that he had here, of Earth.

Nicke stared up at the sky that he no longer recognized, and thought that it was like the memories never existed at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Stagnum ignis' translates to both 'the beloved' and 'lake of fire' according to Google. 
> 
> Comments are always welcome :)


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